Network requirement analysis, plan and design

Project Scope: A case study for Barranquilla Plaza Hotel is considered. The link for the case study referring to Barranquilla Plaza Hotel can be found in the Appendix.

The summary of the case study is that the hotel’s Wireless Access service was poor and had issues, such as dropped connections, dead zones and insufficient capacity. A wireless solution was provided (refer to the case study for further details) which was received very well by the customers. As a result, the overall experience of the customers improved remarkably.

Provided 5 different departments of the hotel, guest rooms, multiple restaurants, pool area, reception area and a bar, a generic network layout diagram of the hotel is presented below for illustrative purposes only.

Assignment Requirement: Provided the advantages of a layered approach (core, distribution and access), the hotel considers redesigning its network adopting a layered approach. The new network design requirements are a) three-layered network design (core, distribution and access) b) redundancy required in the core layer.

Gathering information about the existing network (such as IP addressing scheme, traffic restriction policies, applications used etc.) is paramount for any network redesign for a seamless transition. In this regard, the staff members and IT staffs can be invaluable sources of information. A carefully designed questionnaire can be instrumental in gathering information.

Part I: Information collection

Develop a questionnaire to gather requirements from staff members, IT members and management. The followings are to be covered in this section. 

• What kinds of questions would you ask to understand their environment to each group of users better?
• For the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, it is mandatory to acquire information about the traffic types from the IT staffs and set the bandwidth requirement accordingly. Specifically, for the new design, the followings criteria have to be satisfied. For real-time traffic, bandwidth percentage should be set to 70 of the available bandwidth. For FTP traffic, bandwidth should be set 200 kbps. For SMTP traffic, bandwidth should be set to 800 kbps.
• Note that traffic information is important and will be used for QoS. QoS reflects on the performance evaluation of the design.
• How would you validate and verify the gathered information?

Part II: Network redesign and Demonstration This is a network redesign and demonstration section.

The following are to be covered.

• A three-layered network design (consisting of the Core, Distribution and Access) is needed.
• The new design must be the transformation of the existing design show in Figure 1 (i.e., IP addressing, number of departments etc., should remain intact in the new design).

For demonstration, the format would be a) no more than 2 persons in a group, b) at least 3 viva voce questions related to the design, and c) demo and viva voce duration 5 – 7 mins (at max). The following is to be covered.

• Demonstration of a part of the design in Week 10 lab class (hardware platform)

Note to the lab tutor: As per the need, the lab tutor can allocate 15 mins in Week 9 and Week 10 for work progression check and consultation.